Sunday, July 22, 2007

Of the several million people who have purchased this phone, I may have been one of the few that wanted to import a Comma Separated Value (CSV) contact list into my Motorola RAZR V3xx cellular phone? Before handing over my Blackberry Pearl to my former company I had exported my contacts for importing once I got another mobile phone. A practical solution, right? After all who wants to re-enter 75 contacts through a mobile phone's interface?

This address book import turned out to be a little more challenging than it should have been. First off, Motorola provides an application to do all variety of communication to ones phone, for a price ($40). I've already paid for the phone and this didn't seem practical/economical for a single use.

Not my solutionsHence I wandered the internet in search of an open-source solution. After stumbling across KMobilePhoneTools (linux), P2KTools (Windows), and P2K Commander (Windows). I found that I had spent a number of hours discovering the following tidbits:

Get the driver download (single install) from developer.motorola.com (you'll need to register) rather than attempt all the varieties of drivers provided on the Motorola Modding sites. They worked immediately rather than sitting around and tweaking like I ended up with the other way. This is for P2KTools and P2K Commander (Windows).

Neither of these three tools provided an easy way to upload my contacts. Maybe it is there and I missed it, but I looked around and these tools were developed for a different purposes.

Once I installed this plugin for iSync, I could sync the phone's contact list with the built in address book for the MAC. This address book of course has an import functionality. I imported my CSV and hit sync and within 20 minutes from start to finish I had my old contacts imported. However, I will not get back the minutes I spent trying to attempt this on Linux/Windows :(.

8 comments:

use kaddressbook + gnokii.gnokii needs ~/.gnokiirc file. if this is not there, copy it from /etc/gnokiirc.then use your favourite editor (vi, kate, gedit, ....) to set the port in .gnokiirc to the /dev/foo where dmesg tells you that your phone is located (likely /dev/ttyACM0). and set the mode to AT if your phone is not nokia. see:http://wiki.gnokii.org/index.php/Config

Awesome, I'd really appreciate that. Maybe if you have time also with a mini how to on what I need to do with the file? I get operating iSync and all that, just where exactly I'm supposed to plop this thing. Thanks a million!

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In truth this is my personal documentation area where I hope to save myself time by documenting my home projects, work projects. I also hope to be able to provide others with a simple HOWTO guides, FAQs and other tidbits.